Pack foul-weather gear, three sets of boots, a warm winter jacket and hope you don’t fall into the shark-infested waters off the California coast.

But Kimberly Pratt can’t wait.

The fifth-grade teacher at Cabello Elementary School was selected to berth on a research vessel studying dolphins and whales in the Pacific Ocean this summer, as part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Teacher at Sea program.

For 20 days, she will live with scientists on the 224-foot McArthur II, a ship owned by the administration.

Her ship leaves Seattle on Tuesday and will travel south to San Francisco, stopping for research work in Monterey Bay, the Gulf of the Farallones and the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary, about 52 miles northwest of the Golden Gate Bridge.

It’s a bit like science camp for a big kid. And Pratt, a 4-foot 10-inch fireball with blue braces (to match the ocean), is as enthused about her trip as any 13-year-old counting down the days to summer vacation.

“I’m so excited to see whales in the wild,” Pratt said last week in her Cabello classroom, orange chairs stacked for the summer.

“It’s the experience of a lifetime.”

Pratt’s days at sea will include counting marine life, cutting open fish stomachs to see what they are eating and collecting tissue samples from whales. She and other scientists plan to travel on small motorboats into whale pods — groups of whales swimming together — to collect tissue samples by shooting crossbow firearms or rifle dart guns into the whales.

Scientists aboard the McArthur II in June saw more than 275 whales, dolphins and porpoises, including 103 humpback whales, four killer whales and a sperm whale — the first such sighting in the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary since 1994.

Pratt grew up in Hayward and became fascinated by marine life after seeing a killer whale and dolphins in a Los Angeles marine park when she was a young girl. When she dissected a frog in her seventh-grade science class, she fell in love with biology.

Today, Pratt wears a gold whale’s tail charm around her neck and loves to sail and kayak. If she wasn’t a teacher, she said, she’d probably be a marine biologist. She incorporates marine science into her fifth-grade lessons and hopes that her salty summer tales will turn more students on to biology and science.

To involve Cabello students in the her summer plans, Pratt collected written questions from them that she plans to ask the scientists and the ship crew.

One student asked how starfish stick to rocks. Another wanted to know if dolphins have teeth. A fifth-grader, who perhaps knows that Pratt is a vegetarian, asked what kind of food she would eat on the ship.

“Also, what do jellyfish eat?” the student wrote as a follow-up.

Cabello Principal Holly Scroggins said her school’s theme for the 2005-06 school year likely will revolve around dolphins and whales in conjunction with Pratt’s trip. It’s unusual for an elementary school teacher to receive this kind of hands-on learning experience, and Scroggins appears poised to seize the opportunity.

“The more we know about our world,” she said, “the better we’ll be.”

Pratt will post stories and photographs from the McArthur II on the Teacher at Sea Web site, http://tas.noaa.gov.

Staff writer Grace Rauh covers education for The Argus. She can be reached at (510) 353-7010 or grauh@angnewspapers.com.